Many small businesses in New Zealand tend to advertise their web site address and then their Internet Service Provider (ISP) email address instead of their own email address.

The issues for the small business are:
1. You are promoting your own business as well as your ISP’s business.
2. You will make yourself a hostage to your Internet Provider as if you change providers people will not know how to contact you via email.
3. If you want to change ISP you will need to pay for all of your marketing to be changed.
4. Security. Your email address username is often your account username. This can often be a great way for hackers to gain access to your account.

Myths we often hear as to why businesses are advertising their Internet Service Providers email.
1. Our ISP email is free and our own email will cost us money. MYTH!
2. We will loose all our emails if we change. MYTH!

If you already have your own web site address and a respectable web host company, then you can have unlimited email addresses for free.

If your business wants to gradually make a move from your ISP email to your own email address so you can phase out advertising for your ISP and you already have your own web site address:

1. Set up your email addresses under your own domain
2. Forward all of your domain email to your ISP email or vice versa. This will depend on your technical capabilities.
Include your email and web address in your email signatures.

This entry was posted on August 12, 2009 at 3:03 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Tips and Advice by KT No Comments Yet